Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In recent years, various types of printing devices have become popular for both business and consumer use. In addition to traditional black and white printers, color printers, scanners, copiers, fax machines, and other components are now common. Multifunctional products (MFPs), which support two or more of these operations, are also widely available.
In some instances, multiple printing devices may be on a network for use by one or more user devices. These printing devices may be managed by a management device.
In order to maintain information regarding the state of the printing devices, the management device may poll each of the printing devices for information about the current device state, especially in networks where the printing devices cannot push their status to the management device.
Particularly if the management device has a small amount of processing resources available, or if there is a large number of managed devices, it may be necessary or desirable to limit the frequency with which the management device polls the printing devices.